Traditional help formats deliver your content as unchanging knowledge centers. Today, expectations have changed. Users demand interactive content, content that connects them to communities and product support. Comments, ratings, tags, and open platforms such as wikis offer content providers new ways to interact with end users. The next step, beyond simple interactions, means empowering end users to customize your content delivery to meet their personal needs.

This session explores ideas for end user output customization. Success of this webinar will depend heavily upon everyone’s willingness to show up and share their ideas. Where possible, we will attempt to prototype interactions to learn their potential value in creating end user success.

It’s that time of year again, and WebWorks is getting geared up for the 2012 STC Summit in Rosemont-Chicago, Il. Stop by and see what new things are happening with WebWorks ePublisher as we showcase the latest version of ePublisher, version 2012.1.

European partners, SQUIDDS will be joining WebWorks in booth #208 on tuesday, May 22^nd. SQUIDDS will be giving two separate demos this day. Stop by and see how ePublisher and WebWorks Reverb are making waves on the European market.

SQUIDDS demo times:

SQUIDDS REVERB App–Make Your TechComm On/Offline Available
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 11:00 a.m.–11:15 a.m.

Acolada SIMQIN–Advantages of DITA Authoring & Automated Deployment
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 2:00 p.m.–2:15 p.m.

It’s that time of year again, and WebWorks is getting geared up for the 2012 STC Summit in Rosemont-Chicago, Il. Stop by and see what new things are happening with WebWorks ePublisher as we showcase the latest version of ePublisher, version 2012.1.

European partners, SQUIDDS will be joining WebWorks in booth #208 on tuesday, May 22^nd. SQUIDDS will be giving two separate demos this day. Stop by and see how ePublisher and WebWorks Reverb are making waves on the European market.

SQUIDDS demo times:

SQUIDDS REVERB App–Make Your TechComm On/Offline Available
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 11:00 a.m.–11:15 a.m.

Acolada SIMQIN–Advantages of DITA Authoring & Automated Deployment
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 2:00 p.m.–2:15 p.m.

When you select the “Display Preview” menu item in ePublisher Designer, it now opens the Style Designer alongside the Preview tab. The Preview tab will show an approximation of how your content will look after it has been generated with ePublisher. While examining the content in the Preview tab, you can select paragraphs or tables. When selected, the Style Designer will highlight the corresponding style, saving you the hassle of locating the associated style. From there, you can quickly make modifications to style properties.

See for yourself how ePublisher Designer quickly configures your paragraph styles with the Display Preview capability.

This brief video displays the power and simplicity of ePublisher Designer’s style designer with new preview mode capability. Simply load your project, generate a preview, and begin configuring all your styles. Editable paragraph properties, such as margin settings, borders, backgrounds, fonts, and so much more, are now easily accessible and directly in front of you, allowing you to edit their values in real time, alongside your preview display.

WebWorks ePublisher has been hard at work developing its latest release, version 2012.1. One of the pinnacles of WebWorks’ success is attributed to its in-depth understanding of the value of delivering great help documentation.

Today marks a very exciting day for the WebWorks family as they kick off their 20th anniversary with the first release of the 2012 series. This release not only showcases a new look and feel for ePublisher, but it also incorporates several advancements in customization.

For more information on some of the more notable advancements to this version of ePublisher, visit our Latest Release page. For a more in-depth analysis of version 2012.1, take a look at our Release Notes page.

Improved Look and Feel

One of the first things you will notice once you open ePublisher 2012.1 is the updated look and feel to the splash screen. Our new splash screen now displays four icons signifying each of the quarterly releases offered by the ePublisher platform. As each new quarterly release gets updated, the associated marker icons will fill in notating that you are indeed on the most current version.

ePublisher Start Page

While the start page is not a new feature to ePublisher, you will notice the updated look and feel has also carried over. This more aesthetic accent to the start page is just the tip of the iceberg, however. The ePublisher start page offers users many beneficial points of access. At the top left, you will notice the “At A Glance” section, which offers users avenues to view new features added in the latest release, as well as portals to the WebWorks support system. Just below that, you will see the “Recent Projects” section, allowing users to quickly access their most recent projects or start up new projects. Finally, to the right is one of the most useful and often overlooked features of the ePublisher start page, the “News” section, which offers a current feed from the WebWorks blog. Throughout the year, WebWorks will offer an assortment of insightful articles dealing with both ePublisher and the technical writing industry. Keep an eye out here for insightful whitepapers, ePublisher tips and tricks, upcoming appearances by the WebWorks team, and other communications as we strive to help you grow above and beyond your competition.

Advancements in Customization

Most notable to this release are the advancements in customization. WebWorks has made it easier than ever to customize the way your content is published through improvements to the customization UI and style designer’s preview mode. Check out a more detailed description of these advancements as well as some advances in WebWorks Reverb on our Latest Release page.

Let’s start with a brief history of the Microsoft Word integration with ePublisher. In 2004 – 2005, when ePublisher was being designed, the Word adapter leveraged existing code to process Word DOC files to ePublisher intermediate files (WIF), using Word VBA. Through the years, ePublisher development on the Word adapter has been based on this processing flow, and with each successive release of Word (2007 and 2010), the same processing flow has been used.

In Word 2007, Microsoft introduced a new document format named Office Open XML, which uses a *.docx file extension when saved. Unlike the DOC format, the DOCX format is an XML-based open standard. Up until 2011.3, ePublisher has continued to use the same VBA processing flow for both the DOC and DOCX formats.

So why another adapter? There are a number of issues that show up when processing DOCX files using the DOC processing flow. The root cause of these issues is the fact that the VBA-based processing flow normalizes all files to DOC format. This save is lossy and the effect is that formatting information from DOCX files is dropped in some cases.

Why save DOCX to DOC?  Why not just leave the file in its native format when generating the ePublisher’s intermediate files?  The answer, VBA does not allow inspection of character style runs.  Because ePublisher is unable to use the VBA to iterate runs of character formatting, it relies on a library which inspects the raw bytes of a DOC file. The library is able to derive the runs of character formatting from this analysis. This library only works with DOC files (inspection of runs of character formatting is available in DOCX via XPath), so all files must be saved as DOC before the VBA-based processing flow can be applied.  So, the same processing flow cannot be applied to both Word formats, but only to the DOC format, an inherent constraint of DOC/VBA processing flow.

The new DOCX adapter works around the limitations enumerated above by leaving the original DOCX file in its native format. It uses a combination of DOM manipulation and XSL to produce the ePublisher intermediate files. The effect is that formatting information derived from DOCX files is more correct and complete.

There are some growing pains associated with this new approach. The DOCX processing flow is not as mature as the DOC processing flow. There are a number of issues with the DOCX adapter as of the 2011.4 release, which we are working to address. As of the 2011.4 release, intermediate patches are being made available for the DOCX processing flow which address these issues more immediately than the regular quarterly release interval. Following is a link to the page from which these intermediate patches are available:

http://wiki.webworks.com/Updates/DocxUpdates

There are a number of natural advantages to the DOCX adapter. Because of the problems with character style runs, the DOC adapter is forever tied to legacy 32-bit code. The DOCX adapter has no such limitation. It represents a viable path toward 64-bit binaries. Also, the speed and memory performance of the DOCX implementation are far superior to the DOC implementation, which improves the scalability ceiling of the DOCX format. Finally, while there are no current plans to make the needed changes, the fact that DOCX is open (doesn’t require Word in order to read and manipulate) opens the potential of the format to be used across platforms.

In all versions of ePublisher prior to 2011.3, stationery designers were required to specify the level for each paragraph style that was going to be displayed in the generated table of contents (TOC). While this may seem like a routine configuration, it is somewhat redundant, as it is very likely that the original source document author has already specified these levels. Now, ePublisher can simply detect those levels automatically.

Users with existing projects and stationeries that have already been set up don’t have to do anything. Their TOC levels are already manually set. If you start/create new stationeries or Pro projects, this feature will immediately begin working for you. However, if you decide that the levels specified in your source documents are not what you want, you can still use ePublisher Pro to set the level to a specific value, thus bypassing the auto-detect capability.

Another benefit of this new feature is that it makes ePublisher Pro easier to learn for new users because most of your conversions will now generate a complete and fully functional online help deliverable without users having to learn much about ePublisher Pro’s style designer.

For Example:

“Page Break Priority” allows you to split your document into separate pages by setting auto-detect for your table of contents level
(See Below).

Here you set your table of contents level to “Auto-Detect.” Once properly configured, ePublisher will now automatically detect the appropriate level from the source document.

Output Type:

Once all settings are properly configured, ePublisher will automatically detect your native table of contents level inherent to your source document and render your output into the chosen output format type (Seen here in WebWorks Reverb).

We’ve prepared a short two-question survey based on your technical writing role. We’ll release the results once we have everyone’s responses.

TAKE THE SURVEY NOW >>

We want to hear from you!
Comment on this blog post and let us know what you thought about this whitepaper series.  Do you agree or disagree?  What do you think the future holds for technical writers?